TIRANA – A special cameral ceremony was held on Good Friday at the church of St. John Paul II in the outskirts of Tirana, which is the first church in the world consecrated with this name, during which a plaque was unveiled to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Polish-Bolshevik war, the Battle of Warsaw known as the ‘Miracle of the Vistula’, the 80th anniversary of the crime in the forest of Katinj where the Soviet People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) killed about 22,000 Polish officers.
The plaque as it was announced by a press release issued by the Polish Embassy in Tirana on Friday was inaugurated on the 10th anniversary of the Smolensk air disaster in which 96 people died on the way to commemorate the 70th anniversary of Katinj’s crime, including senior representatives of the army and the Polish government, including President of the Republic of Poland Lech Kaczynski.
“These events constitute the Stations of the Cross for the Polish people and are part of the Polish Golgotha,” said the press release.
Due to Covid-19 pandemic, the ceremony for the placement of the plaque was held at 8.41 am (the exact time of the Smolensk air disaster 10 years ago) with the modest presence of the Ambassador of the Republic of Poland to Tirana, Karol Bachura, the Ambassador of the French Republic, Christina Vasak and the parish priest of St. John Paul II Church, Father Andrzej Michoń (CSsR).
According to Embassy’s statement, the memorial plaque focuses on the figure of St. Mary of Katinj embracing the naked corpse of a soldier killed by a bullet in the back of the head. It is worth mentioning in this case the words of Marshall Jozef Pilsudski, the founder of the Reborn Poland in 1918 and the leader of the Battle of Warsaw in 1920: “He who does not respect and evaluate his past does not merit respect, the present, but neither the right to have a future (…). A nation that loses its memory ceases to be a Nation – it just turns into a concentration of people who occupy temporarily a certain territory.”
“The cultivation of national Memory in times of pandemic, as well as of the hope for a better future is becoming more and more imperative and meaningful as it was today’s simple ceremony on the Day of the Lord’s Suffering at the church of Bathore, near Tirana,” concluded the press release. /argumentum.al
